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June 4–23, 2025
Reception: Saturday June 7, 6–8pm
Westbeth Gallery
55 Bethune St
New York, NY 10014

Video of work featured in the show

Francisco echo Eraso, Desde abajo, 2025. Handmade ceramic roof tiles molded after the colonial roofing from abuelito Erlinto’s since-demolished house in Pasto, Colombia, and Juanita’s streetside roof tile finds in San Pedro de la Bendita, Loja, Ecuador, bass shakers, amplifier, and wood cross, 70 x 70 x 35 inches. Photo: María del Mar Hernández

Featuring work by Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo, Ian Byers-Gamber, Francisco echo Eraso, Harley Hollenstein, Quinn Isaacs, Dan Lucal, Saba N. Maheen, John de Leon Martin, Ariana Martinez, Emily Drew Miller, Pachi, Rachel Mulvihill, JaLeel Marques Porcha, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Natalie Romero, Johnathan Allen Wilborn, Feyaz Yusuff

How might we conceive of the role of the artist, particularly in times of crisis? Can we, in seriousness, claim the aesthetic ought to not be troubled by the political? Is the aspiration or demand to remain untroubled by the weight of the work of art simply an irresponsible desire?

Following the Trace, the exhibition of seventeen artists newly emerging from the Rutgers MFA program, attends to the ambivalences contained within these questions and their perpetually unresolved answers. Varying in form and affective orientation, the artists individually and collectively contend with internal and external experience, political events, infrastructural critiques, and natural phenomena as ethical-aesthetic reflections of the world around them.

If we understand aesthetic production—the painting, the photograph, the sculpture, the performance, the video—as amalgams and distillations of social-cultural and material forces, then the work of art is a genealogy. Extending a multi-directional referential constellation into the past, present, and future, the work of art becomes a projection: a communicative site through which artist and audience negotiate meaning, history, and desire.
The artist is equally excavator and creator: replying to the ghostly haunting, recalling the reverberant echo, formulating the fabulation. The back-and-forth undulation of the tide guides a multivalency of significance and interpretation, revealing the dreamscapes and ways of being in the world that the work of art offers as existential possibility.

Curated by Zoé Samudzi

About the department: The Department of Art & Design at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts seeks to cultivate a diverse community that values visual literacy, critical dialogue, experimentation, and the skills necessary for sustaining a creative life as artists and designers. Central to its vision is engaging in interdisciplinary research and embarking on collaborations within Rutgers and beyond, leaving an imprint on the global arenas of contemporary art and design. Studio arts training is offered in design, drawing, media, painting, photography, print, and sculpture. The department offers five degree programs: a bachelor of arts, a bachelor of fine arts in both visual arts and design, and a master of fine arts in both visual arts and design, as well as a minor in art. Mason Gross Galleries, a 4,200-square-foot space, showcases up to 10 student exhibitions per year—all free and open to the public.

www.masongross.rutgers.edu
masongrossgalleries.rutgers.edu
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Inquiries: Rich Siggillino, Gallery Coordinator, at res241 [at] mgsa.rutgers.edu